Be the Blessing in the Room

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 2 minutes.

A SHORT STORY

I heard a story about the Dalai Lama this weekend that made me pause and reflect.

At the age of 90, His Holiness has been teaching less and less, and shifted how he spends time with people. His main practice these days is simple: for an hour every morning, a group of people is welcomed into the place where he lives. They quietly file by, and he blesses them.

Here is a man known to be one of the wisest humans in the world. And how does he spend his time?

He blesses people.

It reminds me how, deep in the pandemic, I would share an intention with my friend Caitlin on our gratitude calls. A simple mantra: “Be the blessing in the room.” Our mutual friend Kevin later sent me a framed version of the phrase, which now hangs in my closet as a daily reminder.

Lately, I’ve been carrying that phrase with me as I approach my day job. It reminds me that my spiritual practice doesn’t happen only when I’m sitting in a temple surrounded by incense. It happens when I purchase coffee, when I greet someone on Zoom, and in how I show up on the subway.

It lives in the quality of my attention, in the spirit I bring to ordinary moments, and in the quiet ways I meet the world.

A simple reminder: be the blessing in the room.

Where in your life today might you be the blessing in the room?

A POEM

“Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Lameris

_{I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”}

Grateful,

Michael